Tough Guys of the Year: Baltimore's Finest

In print. Onscreen. It didn't matter. No one was more eloquent (or honest) about the inner life of American cities than the men behind The Wire

A cop show that eschewed "justice always prevails" reassurance. A convoluted allthepiecesmatter narrative that defied passive consumption and punished latecomers. A "novel for television" with scripts written by worldclass novelists like Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos. A profoundly angry work of pop sociology that looked through the keyhole of the Baltimore crack game at the institutionalized dysfunction of America at the cold dawn of the twentyfirst century. In the course of its fiveseason run on HBO, which ended this spring, The Wire was all these things. And while it never got ratings commensurate with its rapturous reviews, it was also exceptionally entertaining TV—funny, profane, and (if you hung in long enough to fall in love) compulsively watchable. And since every passing news cycle makes The Wire's assessment of our great, frayed nation seem less cynical and more prescient, we'll permit creator David Simon a wetoldyouso moment. "The Wire explains New Orleans," Simon says. "It explains Iraq. It explains the disconnect between facts on the ground and policy. The Wire didn't reference the mortgage crisis and the drama on Wall Street, because we didn't know about it yet, but it was about those things, and about this particular time."

David and Ed are stuck in traffic, so if you've got anything noncomplimentary to say about them, now is the time.

DENNIS LEHANE: I like Ed a lot, but I think his best work was Brothers McMullen.

**You guys all knew each other to some degree before you started working on The Wire, right **

GEORGE PELECANOS: I knew Dennis for a long time. We've known each other since we started out as novelists. I met Richard when Dennis and I were reading after him…

RICHARD PRICE: In Washington

GP: Washington, yeah. We kinda went and ganged up on him in the green room.

**George, you were the first novelist David recruited to write for the show. How did that come about **

GP: The writer Laura Lippman—David's girlfriend, who's now his wife—had given him one of my books. I guess she said, "Check this guy out—he's doing in DC what you're doing in Baltimore." The social aspect of the crime thing. And then a woman that we both knew died, and we both went to the funeral, and he said, "Gimme a ride back to the shiva," from the cemetery. And on the way back he told me about this show he'd just sold to HBO, and he asked me if I was interested in writing one of the episodes. That was Season 1.

How did he describe it to you

GP: As a novel for television. He said "We're all gonna write a chapter in this novel. I sold it as a cop show, but they don't know it's not really a cop show." Because when you go in to pitch something, it's gotta be quick and it's gotta be one sentence. "Cops and drug dealers, in Baltimore."

Had you done much screenwriting prior to that

GP: I had, but nothing that had been produced. That was one of the things that was attractive. I knew that, writin' for television, mostly, when they pull the trigger and order the episodes, it's gonna end up onscreen. In some form.

**What was the hardest thing about making the transition from novels to television **

GP: Traditionally we would write the first four episodes before the season began. We couldn't do more than that, because too many things were going to change—you could have an actor who kinda took you by surprise and came out of nowhere, and they'd become a major character. Like Snoop—she was only supposed to have four or five lines and then be gone. So a lot of things change during the year. And then by the time you're getting to the last third of the season, they're almost literally waiting on the set for the script. So it was a tremendous amount of pressure as the season went on, because you've presented all these characters and these storylines, and you're trying to figure out how you're going to make them all fit together at the end, without just throwing something out or ignoring something. And somehow we always made it work. That was the big difference between writing the show and writing a book. I never outline my books, I just write ‘em. But I can always go back and change a lot of things before I send it to the publisher. Once you've shot the first half of the season, you can't unshoot it. So you don't want to make that crucial mistake—that's where the pressure is, you can't go back and change it.

DL: Or pray that nobody notices. I've been studying pilots recently, and I was looking at the pilot episode of The Sopranos. And not only do some actors change, but certain references change. Silvio and Tony barely know each other in the pilot. And by the second episode, which they shot months later, they've figured out that Steve Van Zandt's an interesting character, and they're like best buddies. They grew up together. And you can get away with that a little bit at the very beginning of a show. I guess it's like that analogy of, you're building a bicycle while pedaling it. What happens, once you get past episode four, those first four, you better not fuck up.

**Whenever I talk to somebody who's watching the show for the first time, I always tell them that they have to get through the first four episodes before it starts making sense. Especially in the first season. So it's interesting to hear that those first four are written under different conditions—you can almost tell. **

DL: Season 1, yeah. Because Season 2 just takes off like a bullet. I think that's the most commercial season. All of America stands up and says, "There's 13 dead hookers Well, I gotta find out what happens." But Season 1, for some reason, that's the thing you always hear—it's episode 4, it's episode 4.

You gotta put the time in. And if you can stop after the fourth one…

DL: You're a lost cause.

As novelists, you're accustomed to sitting in a room alone and deciding what happens next. You're used to "final cut." Television is a much more collaborative medium. Was there much of an adjustment process

RP: For this Listen, we all have names on our own. So for this, we could check our egos at the door. It's this higher thing. If my entire life was writing like this, I'd go crazy. But this is something you wanna do. And you know the deal—it's an assembly line. A lot of your stuff is gonna get moved into the next episode. Somebody's stuff from the episode before yours is gonna get pushed into your episode. But it's The Wire, so you go with it.

What was it about The Wire** that made you able to let go like that**

RP: It was so fucking good. I mean, I sat there for two years and watched it with my jaw hanging. And when George and David asked me to come on, because of Clockers, which had supposedly been some kind of starter's yeast for David in year 1, I was intimidated. I thought these guys thought I knew a lot more about stuff than I did. I put everything I had into Clockers! I didn't have the secret information in my back pocket that was now gonna come out on The Wire. I was scared to death. But I did know every character, ‘cause I'd been watchin' that show, chapter and verse. Nobody had to explain the characters to me.

GP: I'm not from Baltimore either, I'm from DC. And I think we all had the feeling like, "How am I supposed to know what happens on the corner of Eager Street in West Baltimore"

DL: Right.

GP: But once you got there and saw what was happening, you didn't have to worry so much, because they had so much knowledge. You could write the name of any street and they could change it in the editing process. It wasn't that big a deal.

DL: I mean—literally—I never even wrote a street name. I wrote parentheses. I'd write, "We have soandso at suchandsuch." I was always confused—which is East Baltimore, and which is West Baltimore, and which one is supposed to be worse than the other one

RP: Y'know, the dynamic between cops and dealers, street kids and uniforms—it's universal. The whole point, for me, to go on a ridealong with the cops there, was to reassure myself that it wasn't all that different.

I know you've done that before, researching your novels.

RP: The funniest thing happened. I went on this ridealong, and they picked up this 13yearold kid. They'd been watching him for a while, while he did a million handtohand [drug deals.] So I get in the car. He's cuffed in the back, and I'm sitting in the front. And everything they ask this kid, his answer's like, "Hah" Y'know, like the geesepeople. "Oh, we got you dead to rights." "Hah" "You're gonna go to jail forever." "Hah" "We're gonna eat your mother." "Hah"

Then he's looking at me, and he sees this guy who's obviously not a cop. And he goes, "Who dat" And they go, "Oh, you're in trouble now—this guy's a writer." "Hah" "Yeah—he writes for The Wire." And he goes, "The Wire Why, I love The Wire! I haven't seen all the episodes, but perhaps…" And then he goes, "Did you also write The Corner" And then they say, "So—you like The Wire" And he goes, "Hah"

In general, did most of the specific Baltimore details come from Ed and David, or were there dedicated people on staff in charge of researching what suchandsuch corner was like

GP: We had somebody on staff, but honestly we never used that person. I was a producer, too, so I was there for five years, and I kinda really got to know the city. But also—I don't know how it was for you guys in your towns, but I never had that kind of access in DC. I had to really fight to get in with the homicide crew in DC. It took me fifteen years to get through that door. In Baltimore, I would walk into the station and they would hand me a vest and say, "We're going out on a drug bust, let's go." Nobody ever cared if there was a guy in the car that was a writer from The Wire. It was really different than it was where I come from. The access was totally there. And not just with the police. Down at the docks. And in the schools—we got into the schools for Season 4. We just had full access to the city. What it did for me was—you're always trying to bring in more knowledge, as a writer, and learn more things. And I learned a hell of a lot of new things just working on that show.

Was it easy because it was Baltimore, or because of The Wire Did the show open doors

GP: Yes. And the fact that it was Baltimore. It was just looser.

RP: They're just too busy in Baltimore. You get in a car, like a squad car, that thing is like racing back and forth. Shots fired, shots fired, shots fired.

Richard, I know that part of the reason you ended up writing about a fictional city based on New Jersey was that in Jersey, you could get in with the cops, as opposed to in New York, where it was harder.

RP: Well, I made the mistake of going through channels. It's like the black hole of permission. And then Michael Daly, the columnist, I called him up, and he made a call, and next thing you know, I was in. Don't ever go through channels.

**Whether it's Jersey in Richard's case, or Dennis writing about Boston, or George writing about D.C., you guys have all written in detail and at length about specific American cities. Did you find that what you knew about the towns you'd focused on in your fiction was transferable to Baltimore **

DL: Yeah. There's a lot that's universal. Universal incompetence. City machines. How they run. The ways in which interests contradict each other are pretty common. The smallest school board in the smallest town in America, probably, is a microcosm of it, and even if you blow it up, to the point where it's a massive city government, you probably have a lot of the same problems and a lot of the same themes. And a lot of the same characters. A lot of the same types of people are attracted to that world.

RP: I can't imagine a story taking place in Baltimore that doesn't travel around the country. Baltimore is Gary is the Bronx is Oakland. It's just different slang. And of course, there's always little things. But, y'know, have dynamic, will travel.

Beyond your personal connections to these places, in terms of your background, what's the advantage of writing about places like that, as opposed to places like New York or Los Angeles

DL: The only way I can put it is there's this well in my back yard, and it's my city. And I can go there and reach in and pull a cup out any time I want. Now until that well dries up, why the hell should I walk across the field to another well There's just no point for me. And it doesn't mean that I don't, now and then—part of my new book is set in Tulsa. It doesn't mean I can't go afield if I feel like it. But the first question becomes, do I want to Is there a need for me to go someplace else For me, there hasn't been, so far. The well's still got a lot of water for me.

RP: First of all, I feel like there is no New York, there is no Los Angeles. There's villages. When you say New York City, are you talking about Fort Greene Are you talking about Riverdale Are you talking about Wall Street It's just a bunch of shtetls that are locked into the same incorporated outline. So I don't think about New York or LA, "the New York way," or "the L.A. way."

DL: I think that's the fun of the urban experience, in a lot of ways. There's whole stretches of suburbs where, as Tom Wolfe said, the only way you can tell you've moved from one to another is by the 7Eleven. Each time you see a 7Eleven, you're entering a new one. I think with cities, what's amazing is the sense of these very particular, sometimes Balkanized, sometimes not, villages and subsets. In Boston, I live in the North End, which is historically a very clannish Italian neighborhood, and it truly is like living in a village. I don't know how else to put it. It's a hundred to a hundred fifty years back, in terms of everything. The way they do things. The only bodegas that you'll find in Boston. Boston doesn't have bodegas. We don't have that concept. But we do in the North End. We have all sorts of rules that exist only in the North End. There's a certain way that people greet you in the North End that only happens in the North End. That's really cool. And it makes the city a more interesting place to write about, because of the tapestry, because of the fabric.

GP: But it's also more fun to write about a city, because if you ride the bus one night, or just go to a bar and quietly have a beer, you'll get enough material for a book just listening to people talk. And there's a tremendous amount of humor in it, and poetry in the language, that you don't find outside of a city, I don't find.

You've all been paying attention to this stuff for a long time. Do you feel like things are getting more homogenized Do you feel like that regional character we're talking about is dying out

RP: In New York, definitely. There is no New York anymore. There's no neighborhoods in Manhattan. It's all been incorporated and made vertical, forcing everybody out to the outer boroughs. It just became a place where you can come and drop some euros. It's become like a theme park of itself, sometimes.

DL: But the outer boroughs, don't they have, like—

RP: Yeah, I mean, the outer boroughs—Queens is like the United Nations. It's like the bar in Star Wars. Somebody in a sari sitting next to somebody dressed like the Lion King.

DL: But I think there is a priceofprogress issue that goes on. I think it's really depressing. Don't forget, we're sweeping out a lot of bad shit, too, but there is this kind of sense that there's an old world that's vanishing. And maybe America will thank everybody, but 40 years from now, there might not be a Boston accent.

RP: We'll all be speaking Esperanto.

DL: We'll just be speaking like Ohioans. We'll be speaking like newscasters. I think that's possible.

They said that about England—that as the BBC became more omnipresent, regional accents died out, because everyone started speaking BBC English.

RP: Except Ali G.

Okay—either as writers, things that you worked on, or as fans, which season do you think worked the best

[DL holds up four fingers; everybody nods.]

DL: I think we can safely say this, about Season 4—I remember having a conversation, me and George, and just kinda going, "Where the fuck's David going with this" When we first heard it, it was not this universal feeling, like, "Great idea—let's go to middle school." Initially, we were like, "How are we gonna get the cops in here What are we doing" It was a real faith issue. Like, "Okay, this is where David wants to go, this is where I'll go. I'll follow him." But I wasn't on the bandwagon right off the bat. And then you started to see the canvas laid out, and you went, "Wow. This is impressive." And then when we watched it, y'know…

GP: David always knew what the season was gonna be about, thematically and so on. But we didn't know how we were gonna get from A to B. That was all worked out during the year, in those writers' rooms. But I'll tell you why I think [Season 4] is the best. I think we accomplished what I've always tried to do in my books—we just showed people how things worked, y'know And so the next time somebody says, "Well, if they just put computers in the schools, those kids would all be smarter. Or if they had the same supplies as those kids in the school on the other side of town"—that's fine, they do need supplies, but they also need a good home life, they need safe neighborhoods to walk through and not be dragged to the corners by their peers and stuff like that. And the politicians have to stop making choices out of their own interests, instead of in the interests of the kids. And what we did in that season, I don't know if you guys agree, but I think we showed how things fit together, and why things are the way they are. I don't think that's ever been done on television before.

RP: There's another thing about Season 4, which has nothing to do with the writing, and it's that ensemble—the four kids. They were just irresistible.

It's been strange to watch Tristan Wilds—

DL: On 90210! I saw the poster. I've never seen the show.

RP: Which one

DL: The kid who plays Michael.

RP: Tristan The kid Tristan

DL: It just really troubles me. The ad is on a bus station near my house. And it shows them all sitting in a Jacuzzi—all these anorexiclookin' Megan Fox wannabes, and there's Michael, and he's looking back over his shoulder with a big smile on his face. And I remember looking at it the first time and just thinkin', "What am I gonna bet he's the Troubled Black Kid on 90210 The token troubled kid, who's not from the middle class."

He's adopted.

DL: And I just went, "Oh, that hurts." I mean, I'm happy for him, he's gotta work, but at the same time, there's something about that Jacuzzi shot that just—ohhhh, it killed me.

And he's trying. He's a good actor, but the material's just not there.

DL: And those girls are all just dangerously anorexic. It's horrifying. But I think Richard's right. I think it was the kids. And also—David has a great line, right at the end, in a script he wrote. Carcetti's become mayor, and he's stuck with a $50 million deficit. He's stuck holding the bag. And he has a meeting about where they're gonna pull the money from, and who's gonna get hurt. And this one guy who's in the room says, "Kids don't vote." And that's it. David put the entire series in one line. Kids don't vote.

**George, Season 2 feels like the one that has your stamp on it most clearly. **

GP: Well, that was when David got me in to go work there full time. He said, "I need you, because of the Greeks—we're gonna have a bunch of Greeks on the show." I think he was just trying to rope me in. ‘Cause at the end of that season, you remember, the Greek says, "I'm not even Greek." So that actually had no bearing on the show whatsoever.

RP: I always wondered about that. What's up with the Greeks being the kingpins What is this, like 8,000 BC or something Are we on the plains of Ilium

In your mind, which episodes were the show's high points

DL: I would say George's episode ["Cleaning Up"], from Season 1. I'm not givin' him a fluff. I just think that's a superior episode. And I've never forgotten Doman's speech to McNulty [in Episode 11 of Season 1], about "This is not on you." It's after Kima gets shot. I always thought that was a real high point.

RP: I thought the last three episodes of Season 5 were knockouts. I don't know if it was because they were better, or because you knew that this was the great wrapup, but I thought 8, 9, and 10 of the last year were very powerful.

GP: Richard wrote the paperbag speech [in Episode 2 of season 3.] I was on set that day, when Bob Wisdom did that, and I got chills, man. It was, in one speech to his men, the whole theme of that season.

RP: I think the jawdropping scene was Snoop buying the nail gun. And that was scripted. You think, "This has gotta be all her"—but it was all scripted. I could watch that a thousand times.

DL: And the "Fuck" scene [from Episode 4 of Season 1.] The infamous "fuck" scene.

RP: Anything with Omar.

DL: Anything with Omar.

RP: And then you have the immortal Gus Triandos handjob scene [which Price wrote for episode 2 of Season 3.] David said he had to talk to Gus Triandos, who lives in San Jose, this 75yearold easeball player, and get his permission. He had to explain it: "No, it's an homage to you—it's not a real handjob." And he said, "I don't know—can you find somebody else to give a handjob to" So I came up with the French Angel, who was this professional wrestler with acromegaly, who always played a heavy, but, y'know, in real life was suffering, and knew 14 languages, and my grandmother was nuts about. So I had this whole alternative French Angel routine. And the French Angel was dead.

There's this rumor, which David is forever denying, that Omar's role in the story was enlarged once everybody saw what Michael K. Williams did with the part.

GP: It was enlarged. It was. He was not supposed to be such a major character. Yeah. You can ask Ed and David about it. He was great, and people were obviously really responding to it—I know David read the boards on HBO and stuff like that.

RP: David said the first time he picked up a shotgun on set, he was holding it all wrong.

GP: He didn't even know where to put the rounds. He didn't know how to rack a shotgun.

DL: I always think, it's kinda haunting—I met Michael Williams' mother, during Season 3, and the first thing she said to me was, "Don't you kill my boy." And three years later, when they threw it at me, and they said, "You're gonna kill Omar," that was the first thing that popped into my head, was Michael Williams' mother's face. She looked at me and said, "Don't you kill my boy." And I said, "Don't you worry, ma'am, I won't." And three years later…

Given his occupation, he survived for a phenomenally long time.

DL: He did. He did.

PART II: WIRE** CREATORS DAVID SIMON AND ED BURNS**

Had you always intended to bring in guys like Price and Pelecanos, and other people who didn't come from a traditional TV background

DAVID SIMON: No. A lot of people had told me to read George's books, because he was sort of digging in the same mine. And I was actually resistant to it, just out of bias. He's from Washington, and there's Baltimore weirdness about Washington. Finally, people prevailed, and I read Sweet Forever, and I realized, it really was resonant with what we were trying to do on The Wire. So I'd met him before, but I pulled him aside at the funeral of a mutual friend, and I asked him if he wanted to do an episode. And I talked about it being more in terms of a novel, that these were chapters rather than episodes in an episodic drama. And so he did the penultimate episode of Season 1, and he enjoyed the experience enough that he agreed to come on for Season 2 and help staff the writing part of the show. So it was after George went through Season 2 with us that he felt confident that we could get Richard Price and Dennis Lehane and maybe others to do the same thing. It was George's idea. I wanted to get George specifically, I wasn't thinking about novelists. But George worked out so well, and I was an admirer of Price and Lehane—Price, in particular. I thought Clockers was just a remarkable book.

What was it about those books that made you feel like George would be right for The Wire****

DS: They were so wellresearched. They were capturing portions of the same world that we were trying to depict. They were moralistic—George is something of a moralist—but they were also not judgmental about the characters, in ways that I don't think we wanted to be. And he had a great ear for dialogue, which is of course essential to writing for television.

I know that you didn't spend a lot of time together in a room with these guys. People would come in and get their marching orders, right

DS: Yeah. George would always be there at the beginning, to help us beat out stuff thematically. And Richard was there at the beginning of the third season, when we were laying out the larger stuff. But often they were coming in for a specific episode. The thing about these guys is, they all have day jobs. Sometimes they're finishing a book, sometimes they're on book tour. When we could get ‘em, we could get ‘em, and we were happy to have ‘em. George was different, he was working on the show for a couple years fulltime.

**The thing about TV is that it's collaborative, but somebody's got to have the final say. Were you intimidated at all when it came time to rewrite scripts by the giants of American crime fiction **

DS: It's incredibly awkward. But if everybody's doing separate episodes, and not everyone's gonna be on set, ultimately it has to be made consistent. It has to be made into an integrated whole. You beat stuff out, but you find that certain themes are being hit too hard. That episode 3 is redundant with episode 4, or that you've totally lost track of a storyline and you need to add some scenes. You're constantly reacting to what you've built and trying to make it better. So there are people there at the end of the day who were on staff fully who probably had more influence. Ultimately somebody has to take the last pass over everything, just to make it all make sense and have one thing follow from another and be thematically consistent. But yeah, it's incredibly awkward to edit other writers. It's not a function of, "I had a better idea"—at the end of the day, somebody has to choose, and the choice is awkward. There were times when the writers would discover something that we didn't intend, but that was actually worth keeping, and there were times when they went a little bit outside the lines, and there wasn't room for it. We knew what was happening in the next episode that would prohibit that. Somebody's gotta speak for the whole.

With the possible exception of The Sopranos, The Wire was probably the most criticallyacclaimed TV show of the decade, but the ratings never matched the reviews. Do you think that says something about the flaws in the ratings system Or is there just a bigger gap than we realize between what TV critics like and what people actually want to watch

DS: Actually, I think what happened was, The Wire took a long time to sell by word of mouth. There was one fundamental marketing mistake on HBO's part, which is that they didn't put the DVDs out until after Season 3 started airing. No DVDs after Season 1, no DVDs after Season 2. Only after Season 3 did they get the firstseason DVDs out. And DVD—we didn't know this, but it became the way to watch the show. Go to Amazon.co.uk right now, to the DVD charts—seasons 1, 2, 3 and 5 are in the top 10. Four of the seasons are Top 10, and the other one, Season 4, is #18. Season 4's trailing a little bit, probably because everyone's consuming 1, 2 and 3, and 5 is new. But all 5 seasons are in the top 20. I think it's that way because there's 40 million people in the UK, but half of them live in London, so the churn of word of mouth is more effective. America's a big country. It takes a long while. But this thing has a long tail. People are gonna find The Wire five years from now and say, "Oh, I remember when this was on TV. You got the box sets" People are acquiring TV in a different way now. It's a lending library.

**People are accustomed to grabbing a whole season of a TV show off Netflix and watching it straight through now. It wasn't like that when you started—that's a change in people's viewing habits that happened to take place during the run of the show. **

DS: Yeah. I think it just took a while for word of mouth to catch up. But listen, we did stuff with this show that ensured we were going to have a ceiling when it came to the audience. The race of the cast, for one thing.

**How big a factor do you think that was Do you think there's always going to be a limit on the white audience for a show that's so much about black people **

ED BURNS: It's a show about the inner city. So if you're living in Nebraska—whether you're white or black, it's a different world. If you're a farm guy, a rural guy, it's a different world. And it's something you'll probably click past. I'm sure there are some people who just didn't want to see a bunch of black people. But it's a subculture. [Burns and Simon's 2008 Iraq War miniseries] Generation Kill was a subculture. If you're not into the military, you're not going to watch it. But I really never cared. As long as they'd bring the show back next year, I didn't care what the numbers were.

DS: It's true. Listen—when we went to the port in the second season, we wanted to expand the show, to try and slice off different pieces of Baltimore, so it was time to do the working class. And we tried to represent the approximate racial breakdown of the Port of Baltimore. We didn't think we were making the show more white. Nor did we give a fuck. But black viewers were upset, some of ‘em. But it actually got higher numbers. Season 2 got the highest numbers ever.

Of all five

DS: Yeah.

Wow.

DS: White people. [shrugs] So what did we do for Season 3 We went back to the ghetto. Normally you'd put more white people in. But we were like, "Well, but we have more to say about this," and Ed saw the Barksdale story being able to serve the Hamsterdam thing, which was something I wanted to explore, and he saw other things to say about Avon and Stringer and the relationship, and off we went. And at no point did any of us have a conversation about whether the show should be more white or more black, or what's the proper mixture was, racially. We never had that conversation. Also, one of the things you know going in—you know this from fiction—is that if you put children in jeopardy, people go out of their minds. Putting children in physical jeopardy is one of the great stock moves of all narrative. From Oliver Twist on, it's just huge. So did we do that [in Season 4] because we knew that it was gonna get that emotional reaction, these kids No, we did it because we had stuff to say, passionately, about public education and quality of opportunity.

EB: I think if we wanted numbers, we would have went with the Greeks.

DS: More Greeks.

EB: Big numbers.

DS: They invented civilization.

How ironclad was the plan—did you know all along that you were going to do five seasons, and gradually widen the scope the way you did Did you know when you were writing Season 1 that Season 4 would be about the school system and Season 5 would be about the press

DS: We knew that Ed wanted to do the schools. He was pretty vocal about that from early on. I knew I wanted it to end on the media. I didn't know if that would be Season Five or Six or Four. But I knew I wanted to end on it, because I wanted the last statement to be, "Well, what was it we were paying attention to while all this other stuff happened What were we preoccupied with while Rome burned" That, to me, was the last question. Maybe not the most important question, but it was the final question. Where were we, as a society, and what were we paying attention to And we knew we had to put the political [storyline] in, because we needed it to be in place for the schools. We were almost inventing pieces of the political aspect beginning in Episode 1—we were hinting at it, even though you weren't seeing it headon. So we knew we had to bring that in.

We never had a specific number of seasons [planned] until Season 3. That's when HBO asked us how many seasons we'd need to tell the story the way we wanted to tell it. And we threw it out to the writers, and people brought up a few things here and there, but nothing felt as resonant as education, media and government, for the last three issues [we'd look at.]

When we were already beating out [seasons] 4 and 5—which had to be connected, because of the Marlo [storyline] running through it, David Mills came up with [the idea of doing a season about] immigration. Obviously that's become a huge theme in American politics, and it would have been worthwhile to pursue that. Baltimore's Latino immigration has been a very recent phenomenon. We were one of the few East Coast cities not to have a very large Latino immigration until the last ten years, and not even significantly until the last 5. But it's just started to be a big thing over in Southeast Baltimore.

But at the time, we were already prepping season 4, which had to lead into 5, which had to be the last season. HBO had already been kind enough to give us 5 [seasons], so for me to go back and say, "Oh, we just thought of another good idea—give us 6. And oh, by the way, we have to stop prepping what we're prepping"—there was no time. We would have been off the air for two years, doing the research.

So had there been a Season 6…

DS: It wouldn't have been 6. [Immigration] would have had to be Season 4. I wasn't going to finish on it. I was gonna finish on the media thing.

So you would have had to push it off…

DS: And pushing it off would have set us back too far.

EB: It would have been a side track, like Season 2 was.

DS: Yeah. Right. And we could have done health care, we could have done a number of things. But the problem is, the central characters, like McNulty—at a certain point, taking them off the cliff each time becomes less credible to their arc. How many times can McNulty be the straw that fucks up the drink, y'know So if you're gonna go in for another bite of the apple, is it worth it Or should you conclude this thing saying what you know you can say effectively, and then move on and tell another story ‘Cause there's other stories to tell.

**So HBO came to you at the end of Season 3 and asked you how much more time you needed **

DS: No. They came to us at the end of Season 3 and said, "Look. You're ending the Barksdale storyline. You're never gonna get better reviews. Why don't we just end it now and go do something else You have other projects to work on. If we do the schools thing—it's never gonna be a hit. We're gonna get a good, solid, committed audience. But you've grown it about as much as you can grow it." It actually grew a little more, by word of mouth, and because of the DVDs, which actually came out after Season 3, but nobody anticipated that. So the argument was, "If it's not gonna grow that much more, and if we've already gotten the best reviews we're gonna get, why don't we take our $40 million and make something else, that might be a bigger hit, that might be a fresh start" So we said we wanted to do [a season about] education. And I gave ‘em Ed's storylines for that. And we really want to do the media, and examine why it is that these worlds all seem fresh. What were we paying attention to that it seems like The Wire is about this undiscovered country It shouldn't be. So those were the two arguments. I laid out the plotlines of both, and they said, That's great. We'll give you another year. You gotta do those. Congratulations. Those were the two that we had at the time. And I remember saying to the other writers, y'know, you got anything else And Richard talked about juvenile justice, briefly. But those were the two that resonated with everybody. So those were the two that I pitched. And having pitched, and having gotten their approval, when another idea came up, we were in no place to pivot, y'know If David thought of that a year earlier, I might have pitched three.

Was that as close to cancellation as the show ever came The most onthebubble you ever were

DS: The end of season 3, yeah.

Them suggesting that maybe you could sort of…

DS: End it. Yeah. That was as onthebubble as I thought we ever got. Certainly, after Season 4, too, HBO—they weren't having financial problems, but they were trying to hone their production budget. And they were really hungry for a hit. There was some argument that maybe we stop after 4. But I thought that was disastrous, because if we'd left Marlo, and left all the bodies in the houses, that would have been an appalling ending.

Right. The last scene of Season 3, with Bubbles and Bunny Colvin standing in the ruins of Hamsterdam, feels much more like an ending.

DS: And that's what HBO said. "This could have ended it." And I said, "Well, if you don't want to say anything about education, and you don't want to hold society as a whole accountable for the particulars of this, sure, you can end it there. But we have more to say." And they were very kind about hearing out the story. That was [thenHBO chairman] Chris [Albrecht] and [HBO entertainment president] Carolyn [Strauss].

You actually sat in a room with HBO ecutives and argued that the show needed to go on because it hadn't held society sufficiently accountable for its failings Does that cut any ice in a meeting like that

DS: I don't know if I phrased it that way. I mean, I told them what my motivation was. But what they were really concerned about was story. So I'm dancing with ideas that Ed had for the schools season, and I'm dancing with ideas that were in my head for the media thing. And I'm throwing in, "And this would happen, and McNulty would be left here, and there would be this, and Bubbles would finally get clean," and I'm doing that kind of dance, hoping they'd say yes. They said yes to Season 4. And then they didn't say yes to Season 5 until the reviews came in for Season 4, and then they realized that they were going to have to let it finish, no matter what.

EB: Although they did cut it back.

DS: Well, they did. But in the end, Ed, they said "Can you do this in eight" And I said no. I said, "Let me beat it out to ten." As it happened, we were able to do it in ten, and the last one was an hour and a half. Midway through, I had a conversation with Carolyn. She said, if you need 11, tell me. Make sure you finish this properly. So there was a back door. But the truth is, once we'd committed to the ten, once it started to work—the truth about season 5 was, we were only doing the media component, which was answering one fundamental question. We weren't revisiting the schools. We didn't have an election going on, because we'd finished the election in Season 4. So we had to finish the Marlo case, address ourselves to the last question of what was society paying attention to, and get out. And so only a few things got tossed in the end. We didn't do as much with Prez. We didn't do as much with Cutty.

EB: I was thinking it could have been the other way. We could have spent a little more time in the newsroom, fleshing out the characters.

DS: Mmmm—I don't know. I think they did what they were supposed to do. Ultimately, unlike the wonderment of police work, or the ruthlessness of politics, the trouble with the newsroom is that what we're trying to do is prove a negative, which was that they were oblivious to everything that actually mattered and they concentrated on that which didn't. And that stuff wears thin. The trouble with the newsroom is they're not at the razor's edge of human endeavor in the way that politicians and cops and drug dealers are. I was a little worried that that was going to seem a little insidebaseball the longer we dwelled in that environment. I needed them to do what they were gonna do, and fail to do what they were gonna do. I looked at it, and wondered what we were losing, and I honestly couldn't go back to Carolyn and ask for more. So on a practical basis, I was being as responsible as I could be, fiscally, without damaging the piece.

Do you think that quality, of not being at the razor's edge, is part of why the journalism plot bothered some people That was the first time I'd ever seen a bad word about the show in the press.

DS: I actually don't think that mattered one way or another to people. I think the people you saw react to it were journalists. School administrators and politicians and longshoremen and drug dealers and cops and police administrators, they don't blog and they don't write. And the trouble with journalism right now—there's a lot of troubles, and one of them's fundamentally economic—but I believe the metanarrative that journalists have embraced right now is, "We were doing nothing but making the world safe for democracy, doing our jobs, being heroic, and then the economic climate and technology changed, and the Internet is now eviscerating us, and it's falling apart, and we are victims." But I took the third buyout from my newspaper before the Internet even existed, as a concept. When journalism was profitable, extremely profitable, newspapers did not improve and hone their product and make the product more meaningful. They concentrated on that which was not particularly relevant, which was a little bit onanistic and selfabsorbed, and then when the Internet did arrive, they had an inferior product, that wasn't something they could charge for online. So it was a twostep process by which that industry was utterly mismanaged. And it's all fun and games when you're saying nasty shit about [Wire police administrators] Rawls and Burrell or [corrupt Wire mayor] Royce and his chief of staff, but the moment you say it about the journalist, who's feeling only the victimization of what's happened over the last few years, it's infuriating.

It's also interesting, because in a lot of ways, the media was the show's core audience, especially in the early years when no one else was watching except TV critics.

DS: It was porn for journalists. It was porn for them. It was stuff they couldn't say as bluntly as you can say with drama, because life is antidrama and reporting is reporting. And then all of a sudden, y'know, they were all tarted up and wearing the hooker shoes and dancing around, and they didn't like it one bit. But the truth is, you look at Rawls or Valchek or Burrell, and you look at the editors of the Sun, and you look at Royce and his chief of staff, I don't detect any change in tone. At all. I honestly don't. They've always been George Macready and Adolphe Menjou, from Paths of Glory. The bosses are the bosses. Our point of view was always with labor and middle management. Always. Go watch that movie again, Paths of Glory. It's amazing how, whenever you have two guys at the top who are in a selfpreservation mode, they all behave the same. Same with the assistant school superintendent, in her scenes. When you'd see the top end of the system—it's George Macready, just getting ready to shoot another French soldier.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain are purportedly fans of the show.

DS: Yeah. Although Barack seems to know the name of one character and what he represents. McCain just said…

GP: He's doin' a "Me too."

DS: I don't know. Someone needs to give him a pop quiz. They need to ask him Snoop's real name, or something. Yeah, I don't know what that's about.

**What do you make of that, though **

DS: I got nothin'.

You don't find it interesting or ironic that the guy who's running on the "Change" platform is praising a show about how reformers are perpetually stymied by entrenched, selfprotective institutions…

DS: About the lie of reform Listen, I don't know. I'm glad he seems to like the show. Maybe one day he'll explain why and I'll know more. But I don't quite know what to say. We didn't write it for either of them.

Was he on your radar at all as you were writing the mayoralelection storyline There's that one moment, in the courtroom scene, when the corrupt Senator, Clay Davis, refers to Rupert Bond, who's crossexamining him, as "Prosecutor Obonda"…

DS: Oh, well, yeah. We were referencing a subtext in the black community at that time—the question of "Is he black enough" It actually seems a little dated now. It's much less relevant now that [Obama is] the nominee. Now that he's not running against an alternative, he's as black as he is. He's just the Democratic nominee, and you don't hear that venting you heard in the black community. But a little of it just exploded, a few months ago, when Jesse Jackson lost his mind. That was the same dynamic—the oldline civil rights leadership resenting the interloper. We were hearing a lot of that stuff, months ago.

In some ways, this was a hyperspecific show about drugs and crime in Baltimore, but it seemed like you were always trying to use the setting to look at larger themes in American life.

DS: Yeah. It's about the decline of the American empire. It's about a culture that can no longer recognize or acknowledge its own problems, much less begin to solve them. You look at The Wire and it explains New Orleans—we think. I mean, we may be wrong. We took our best shot. But it explains New Orleans. It explains Iraq. It explains the disconnect between facts on the ground and policy. The Wire made no mention of New Orleans. It made scant mention—except allegorically, at points—of the war in Iraq. And yet it was about those things, and about this particular time. We didn't reference the mortgage crisis and the drama on Wall Street, because we didn't know about it yet, but it makes perfect sense, in the construct of this narrative.

It's too simple to say it's "corruption" or "evil" or anything as simple as that. This is about a country that's become nothing more than a pyramid scheme. And the people in the pyramid are looking to salvage themselves, and aggrandize themselves, and nobody has their eyes on the community. That's what The Wire is about. You can say it's about urban America, but what is America, other than "urban" Eighty percent of us live in cities. At the Republican convention, all that nonsense about "smalltown values" Fuck smalltown values. That's twenty percent of the country. I'm worried about where eighty percent of us live. I need bigcity values to matter. I need bigcity sensibilities to prevail. I need to know how lots of us are gonna live together in a small confined area, because that's how we live. So, y'know—saying The Wire's about urban America is saying it's about who we are.

**You were nominated for an Emmy Award this year, for the series finale, but you didn't attend the ceremony. **

DS: I had other stuff to do.

Were you that sure you were going to lose

DS: I wouldn't have gone if I thought I was going to win.

Really Why not

DS: Did you watch Season 5

Yeah.

DS: Okay. Part of the critique of journalism in Season 5 was that instead of examining the real "why" of issues, and really analyzing what our problems are and how to address them, journalism had reduced its ambitions to something much smaller, and much more onanistic—a prize culture that rewards "gotcha" and quoteunquote "impact" journalism, and shaping shit to win a prize. I saw an awful lot of that in journalism. It was one of the destructive forces in play. So if that's part of my critique, for Season 5, how hypocritical would I have to be to give a fuck whether or not Hollywood decides The Wire should have a prize Y'know, I did it when George was nominated the year before last, but I really did that in support of George. And I did it when I was nominated for [the 2000 HBO miniseries] The Corner, because it was a chance to take Fran Boyd, the real woman from The Corner, to the Emmys, and to have her go onstage if we won. We didn't do this show for prizes. The work is all that matters. It really is. So it wasn't like a fuckyou to the Emmys. It wasn't angry. I was in the UK, doing promo stuff in support of Homicide, which was rereleased there. That's what I was doing. But I had no intention of going. At a certain age you have to be grownup about shit, you know what I mean And Ed Burns surely wasn't going.

Can you tell me who you sent

DS: I offered it to Michael K. Williams and Felicia Pearson. And I said, y'know, if we win, go up and say "Thank you," and it turned out the Emmys wouldn't let anybody—there were no substitutions. But I said, just go and enjoy the party.

You've said before that you didn't have any illusions that you could change anything by doing this show.

DS: Nor do I now.

But do you think the show has had any effect on the conversation about some of the issues you were exploring, or introduced anything new into that conversation What do you think its legacy is going to be, beyond sixtysome hours of betterthanaverage television

DS: I think it'll stand as an integrated story that was about something. And I hope we're wrong—I hope that what we think it's about doesn't turn out to be true in the long run, because what it's about is the end of empire. I'm hoping that what we were saying doesn't seem prescient ten or fifteen years from now, when people stick those DVDs in. I'm hoping that it seems overly pessimistic. And maybe it will. But we took our shot. It's what we actually believe. It's what seems to be occurring in a consistent framework, with regard to everything from the subprime mortgage disaster to New Orleans to the war in Iraq. It seems as if we're overextended as a culture, and as if the capacity to address problems is no longer within our grasp. And that's what The Wire was about.

And so somebody might stick the DVDs in, ten years from now, and go, "Hey, these guys got a few things right." Or they may say, "These guys didn't know their ass from their elbow." I don't know what it'll be. It's going to take a while to figure that out. I think it was good storytelling and I think it was integrated, and all five seasons will hold together thematically, as a whole. As a sixtyhour depiction of America at the millennium. I could be wrong. That was its ambition, but it's very hard to say, in light of having just finished it, that it'll amount to anything at all.

Have you ever seen Heimat It's a German series, about the life of a German town, from World War I until World War II. It's brilliant. From the distance of history, they did something that had some certitude. Because we were operating in the present tense, or the near present tense, who knows You can't know. It would be presumptuous for me to act like I'm some kind of Noam Chomsky, like I can see the future. We did the best we could. It was a bunch of smart people, they all had ideas. They all kicked in. Ultimately, everybody was essential for what they brought to the table, and it represents—there's a lot of Ed Burns in there, there's a lot of George, there's a lot of the novelists. And there's a lot of me. But ultimately it represents a consensus about what matters, and what is not being attended to, in terms of America.

You mentioned things that put a ceiling on your viewership—do you think your decision to make it about those issues was one of those things

DS: Y'know. I think the episodes themselves paid out. Maybe they didn't pay out on every episode the way [traditional] episodic TV does, but we paid out character and story as well. We weren't interested in just making an entertainment, but we understood that it needed to be entertaining on some level. We picked up some viewers who liked that kind of storytelling better, and we lost some viewers who, when they got to the end of an episode, said "They didn't make an arrest, they didn't give me any resolution, what the fuck" We lost some of those people. But we picked up some people who don't normally watch TV.

Listen, Ed had it exactly right. We didn't give a fuck about the numbers. HBO did, on some level. But not even as much as a regular network. So if they were OK with the numbers, then we were okay. All we wanted to do was tell our story to the end. It was touch and go there for a little bit, but they let us do that. Ed's right that when they said eight [episodes for the 5th season], we were pretty stressed. And I said, I don't think I can do it in eight. But they immediately let us have ten, and I was told privately, by Carolyn, listen, if you can't fit it in ten, let me know. And when I had to go back to her and say, I gotta do an hour and half to finish this out, and she said, Well, do you need 11 And I said, no, I think actually it's better if it's an hour and a half at the end. I think it was pretty organic, and we weren't pigeonholed into anything too cruelly. We could have done more in the newsroom, but I think it had about as much newsroom as was justifiable. I needed the fabulist to interact with McNulty's lies, and I needed to honestly critique what I thought were the failings of journalism, of newspaper writing. And we said that. But arguably we were arguing for the absence of something, in season 5. We were basically saying that all the problems we've shown you are not being addressed, and instead they're jerking off over bullshit. And how long you can say that, in how many scenes—at a certain point, it becomes problematic.

Were you selfconscious about being too close to the material, coming from a journalism background

DS: No more than Ed, having been a teacher for seven years, or [Wire writer/producer] Rafael Alvarez, coming from being in the Seamen's Union, coming from the maritime industry. Or [Wire writer] Bill Zorzi having covered politics. My feeling is, there's a lot in Season 5 that's a love letter to journalism. This is not people who hate newspapers, or are angry at their alma mater. I'm angry at what happened to my alma mater. I love the Baltimore Sun. I grew up there. So did Bill Zorzi. The only thing I was conscious of was that the mythology of pure victimhood is ripe in journalism at this time. I was very conscious that somewhere, about halfway through the run, a lot of journalists—not rankandfile journalists, not a lot of people who're in the trenches, but a lot of powers that be, pundits, managing editors and publishers and columnists who haven't seen the pavement in years—a lot of them were gonna be wailing like cats with their tails on fire. So in one of the middle episodes, we had the judge say "Don't piss off people who buy ink by the barrelful." It's an old line, but we had the judge say it at that moment, because we knew. It's all fun and games when you're criticizing every other American postindustrial institution. But oh, now you're going after a sacred cow.

None of those other institutions you criticized really have a voice.

DS: Right. You don't think Ed worked out what he experienced in the Baltimore city school system in season 4 But [school administrators] don't blog and they don't publish. So that's okay. I was glad to get the argument going. But ultimately, until journalism reembraces its higher ambitions, something a lot higher than grubbing a Pulitzer or dancing around with stuff they regard as "impact" stories, until it starts realizing that it mattered when it chose to explain the world in an increasingly sophisticated and subtle way…

When I was in journalism school, they told us that newspapers were going to become more like magazines, and magazines were going to become like fucking books. Everything was going to get smarter. And when the money was there to make it smarter, it got stupid. And then the real poverty landed, and newspapers were in no position to charge for their product, because their product was inferior. And now it's a horror show. What we were describing is the exact equivalent of Detroit in the 70s. Hey, we have a monopoly. What the fuck—let's make Gremlins and Pacers and Chevy Vegas. And then all of a sudden you don't have a monopoly, and you're standing there on the lot going, "Hey—buy my Vega." And that's what happened with journalism. You saw them manufacturing Chevy Vegas, and then you saw the monopoly ending. And you saw the panic in the newsroom. And those who only wanted to believe that they were still putting out Thunderbirds, and that all was fine, and that it was all heroic in the ‘80s and ‘90s—they were greatly offended by The Wire. But they're also full of shit.

Ultimately, there was a problem with the message. Journalists did not want to hear that they were at all complicit, as an industry, in their own demise. But it was something we felt the need to say. And, by the way, I say "they," but the truth is I got 600 emails from people at newspapers, in the trenches, who were like, "This is my fucking life every day." It's been the same dynamic all along. If you go to the Baltimore police department, all of the beat cops and detectives are like, "I fucking love the show. This is my fucking life. You got it. You got it." But then, if you go up to major and above, you hear, "Well, actually, we're a lot more functional than you give us credit for. We've actually made some improvements in how we're approaching drug enforcement." Same thing in the school system. You get above the rank of assistant principal, and it's all about, "Hey, the test scores are going up. We've got a handle on this thing now. No Child Left Behind is working." The same thing happened in journalism. But journalism—they vent outward, rather than inward.

It's ironic, because it's exactly the kind of thinking The Wire** critiqued at every turn. The cops at McNulty's level are trying to get to the root of Baltimore's drug problem, but they're continually undone by the department brass, who are only interested in making showy busts. They want "dope on the damn table," as Daniels puts it.**

DS: Oh, yeah. We just came from a thing at John Jay [College of Criminal Justice, in New York]. Ed and I were arguing for decriminalization, and an end to drug prohibition. And there was a prosecutor from Brooklyn there, and she was like, "We're making good cases, and it's a lot more functional than The Wire makes it look." And we were like, Okay. I just know nationwide we're still the jailingest motherfuckers on the planet, and people are going to jail for lessviolent crimes than ever before.

Look, we said what we wanted to say. And one thing you will not see me doing is arguing with critics who didn't dig this or that. It's like, y'know, I'll argue with people about what I think went wrong with journalism, and Ed will argue about why he thinks No Child Left Behind is a disaster. And I'll argue the drug war with anybody. I'll argue content with anybody, because we did the show to provoke discussion and argument. I want discussion and argument to continue, on the issues. That would be a nice fringe benefit to having made The Wire. I won't get into an argument with somebody who says, "I didn't like this actor," or "This character was overdrawn, this character was underdrawn." There's no point. To each his own. And I've already had my say.

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